Monday, June 24, 2013

Whey Up knows how to make their protein drinks taste like smoothies, and the caffeine variety is no different. The berry has that lovely tart sweetness and slight acid tang of a yogurt smoothie, but so much easier to swallow. The good thing is that if you like the taste of a yogurt protein shake, you will love this drink. There is not even a hint of caffeine and all you taste is just that yummy milky sour taste.

I have been wanting to try out Whey Up for a long time, but the cost of a bottle was always a little prohibitive to me. I dont mind spending a little for an energy drink, but the three bucks or more this usually sells for is a little stepp for me - seeing as I have a fridge of caffeinated goodies to play with already chilling in my bertha, me energy-drink fridge.

Fortunately, one day my local 7 11 got their pricing mixed up, and I was finally able to exact my revenge for that time they gave me a counterfeit 5 dollar bill as change and would not exchange it. I was able to walk out of there with three Whey Ups for less than the cost of one at GNC. I tried two of these out at the gym, and one while trying to code up a web site late night.

Packaging:9
Whey up has gone a very long way from their first product line - coming in a big aluminum can. Now whey up looks like a real workout drink, coming in a nice clean attractive PET bottle. It is good to see that a drink with such promise has evolved their look over the years to a point in which it is a very serious looking workout drink.

Their design is a very nice and clean swirl pattern, very busy, but still calling attention to the major benefits of this drink. It looks very pro - like something that a big sporting manufacturer would produce. Every ingredients is labeled in non-intrusive way, along with their caffeine and protein content, and it still looks like something I would happily take to a trendy gym and pull out of an expensive gym bag - not that I go to a trendy gym or anything (as long as I don't pull out a bottle of Jack Daniels to work out with, I doubt anyone would even pay attention).

Taste:9
Whey Up tastes yummy - if you get into yogurt based drinks. The whey and berry flavors in here give Whey Up a definitely flavor of a thick yogurt shake, although that is not really a bad thing. For one thing, it is not really thick - it just tastes like it should be. It has that litte bit of chalkiness that makes the whole drink very cloying and puckery.

Strangely, the cloying and sour works in its favor. You can definitely feel this drink working, kinda like slugging a V8 when you are hung over. Whey Up is a drink that you take seriously, and drinking it gives you a few seconds of pause. I could almost feel the protein and caffeine kick into my body, preparing me for an intense gym workout. Whey up is certainly not a drink to just have when you are tooling around on the computer trying to concentrate on coding - moments after consuming you will feel an urge to start lifting things and going for a quick few laps around the house.

Buzz: 8
Going along with their theme of building a workout drink right, they don't add any of the garbage that are in sports drinks and chemicals before doing something healthy for your body. The 22mg of protein in here is from whey and not soy, so it is a better form of protein. Also the 150mg is a nice boost without really getting you pumped. By the end of the workout I was not feeling tired, but it is not like I was feeling any sort of rush from it either. It seems like this is really a great pre-workout drink to get you to the gym and pumped while you are there, but it is not such a good one to help you recover from an intense workout afterwards. So don't expect a boost from it, a much as a more intense workout.

Besides the caffeine and protein, I like the ingredients list. They sweeten things with sucralose, which makes for the fewer calories than if they used sugar, no preservatives, and the only non-natural ingredients in any of their formulas that I see if a little food coloring. There is a few energy drink ingredients in here too, like inositol, glucurolactone and the required B vitamins (after all, you can not make any product these days with the word energy and not have B vitamins in them). Overall, if it were not for the face that these are so damn expensive, I would add them to my regular workout regimen.